Dual-Core Turion in Action: Acer Aspire 9300 Notebook Series. Page 10

We would like to introduce to you a full-size 17-inch notebook family from Acer built around the dual-core AMD Turion 64 X2 processor. It is a pretty inexpensive notebook, but offers good performance and a rather long battery life. Read more in our review!

The notebooks both have discrete graphics solutions on board, so we tested them in three versions of 3DMark: 3DMark 2003 3.6.0, 3DMark 2005 1.2.0 and 3DMark 2006 1.0.2.

Compared with the previous version, 3DMark 2005 uses Shader Model 2.0x/3.0 instead of Shader Model 1.x, provides full compatibility with Shader Model 2.0, includes more complex tests (over a million polygons per each frame), and employs normal maps. 3DMark 2006 brings support for HDR, Uniform Shadow Maps, and multi-core CPUs. It is overall oriented at Shader Model 3.0, but two out of its four graphics tests work within the Shader Model 2.0 framework.

3DMark uses a set of 3D scenes rendered by its own graphics engine to load the graphics subsystem in various ways.

The weakness of the SE version of the GeForce Go 7600 SE shows up here. It is not much better than the GeForce Go 7400 (but the latter can take an additional 128 megabytes from system memory using its TurboCache technology). Performance doesn’t fall too much in the battery mode because most graphics cards from Nvidia come with rather mild power management settings, and this GeForce Go 7600 SE is not an exception.

There was no standard demo record in Quake 4 , so we had to create it by ourselves and will use it in every following review of notebooks on our site so that different notebooks could be compared under identical conditions.

The notebooks have very low results in Quake 3 , probably due to the frequency and micro-architecture of their CPUs, which are both quite important for this benchmark, and to TurboCache technology the GeForce Go 7400 has to use. In Quake 4 the results are quite high and do not decline much in the battery mode. It means that the speed of this application depends on the graphics subsystem rather than on the CPU.